XML documents can contain non ASCII characters, like Norwegian æ ø å , or French ê è é. To avoid errors, specify the XML encoding, or save ...
XML documents can contain non ASCII characters, like Norwegian æ ø å , or French ê è é.
To avoid errors, specify the XML encoding, or save XML files as Unicode.
XML Encoding Errors
If you load an XML document, you can get two different errors indicating encoding problems:An invalid character was found in text content.
You get this error if your XML contains non ASCII characters, and the file was saved as single-byte ANSI (or ASCII) with no encoding specified.
Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported.
You get this error if your XML file was saved as double-byte Unicode (or UTF-16) with a single-byte encoding (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8) specified.
You also get this error if your XML file was saved with single-byte ANSI (or ASCII), with double-byte encoding (UTF-16) specified.
Windows Notepad
Windows Notepad save files as single-byte ANSI (ASCII) by default.If you select "Save as...", you can specify double-byte Unicode (UTF-16).
Save the XML file below as Unicode (note that the document does not contain any encoding attribute):
<?xml version="1.0"?> <note> <from>Jani</from> <to>Tove</to> <message>Norwegian: æøå. French: êèé</message> </note> |
The file above, will NOT generate an error. But if you specify a single-byte encoding it will.
The following encoding will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?> |
The following encoding will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> |
The following encoding, will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> |
The following encoding , will NOT give an error:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?> |
Conclusion
- Always use the encoding attribute
- Use an editor that supports encoding
- Make sure you know what encoding the editor uses
- Use the same encoding in your encoding attribute
